“It’s heartbreaking because these are people trying to rely on a bike for transportation, but our streets are just not quite suited for that type of travel,” Brown said.

So why are Sacramento streets so dangerous?

“You’ve got this deadly combination of streets that are already dangerous to ride on, you got people driving more on average, and you got them driving faster than we want to see them be driven,” he said.

“In Sacramento County, about half of all fatal by collisions occur south of Broadway and West of Power Inn Road,” he said.

He says the city of Sacramento is making progress, like installing new high visibility bike lanes downtown. And an intersection near Sacramento State that has dedicated bike boxes at the front of the line for cyclists to get a head start in traffic.

“We haven’t quite seen the investment in the outlying areas that we would like to see,” Brown said. “Unfortunately it’s these kinds of streets (like Stockton Boulevard) that discourage people from riding a bike because they are just intensely scary.”

The city has a Vision Zero policy, a team committed to eliminating all traffic fatalities by 2027 and say it has several efforts underway to meeting this goal.